'I don't like to be looked at'

Only one thing seems to stand between singer-songwriter Ray LaMontagne and greatness: his own crippling shyness. He talks to Bernadette McNulty

In the show-off world of music, Ray LaMontagne is a very shy man. From his arrival in the UK last November, critics fell over themselves to hail him as the heaven-sent incarnation of Van Morrison, Otis Redding and Neil Young.

An appearance on Jools Holland's show sent sales of his debut album Trouble soaring, and a fast ascent to fame with a record-buying audience clearly voracious for sensitive troubadours like Norah Jones seemed certain.

A year later, that trajectory appears to have stalled. In the acoustic summer of love enjoyed by James Blunt and Daniel Powter, LaMontagne should have been king. Yet you rarely hear his songs on the radio and he remains well beneath the mainstream radar.

His chronic discomfort appearing live or playing the publicity game must have contributed to this. In one of his rare appearances in London this summer, he played in the upstairs room of a recording studio to a tiny crowd of fans - no more than 30 people. Still, LaMontagne was nervous, trembling almost, his eyes closed to the wall of people gazing adoringly at him. He asked the sound engineer to turn the lights down - who by accident hit the off switch. "Keep it like that," LaMontagne shouted. He wasn't joking.

The rest of the gig took place in complete darkness. But soaring through that blackness, freed of self-consciousness, was the voice that had brought those fans, an almost shockingly beautiful voice singing the most tender love songs that made the blinded audience swoon and shake and cry.

As he hides behind a forest of hair and beard and folded arms and legs, interviewing LaMontagne is like trying to coax a terrified animal into the open. I try to congratulate him on his beautiful performance at this year's V Festival, how he had blown away anyone else I had seen play.

"It was awful. The sound was appalling and I couldn't hear myself," he says in a voice so soft as to be almost unrecognisable from the lion's roar of his singing. But what about the crowd, the way they knew all the words, the way they worshipped him as if it was a religious ceremony?

"They didn't like me. They just stood there." But what about all the critics who have hailed him as a genius? "The critics also say my guitar playing is bad."

LaMontagne is beyond self-deprecating. "I'm very uncomfortable in my own skin. I don't like myself and I don't like to be looked at. The only way I can perform is by getting into a zone and shutting myself off."

His fragility is perhaps understandable given the brutality of his upbringing. A music-loving but violent father left his mother and six children to an itinerant and impoverished life, living in, as he describes them, chicken shacks and car lots, moving from state to state. "We were so poor I have no idea how my mother managed to raise all of us at all."

As a result, sensitive LaMontagne grew up pessimistic and despairing of life. Then, working nightshifts in a shoe factory, he had a musical epiphany at 4am when a Stephen Stills song came on the radio. For the next five years he worked as a carpenter by day and at night immersed himself in music and songwriting.

After a painful gestation period he finally found his voice and, having been signed to a major label, got in the studio to make his debut album with producer Ethan Johns, son of legendary Rolling Stones and Eagles producer Glyn, and the man behind the raw country-rock sound of Ryan Adams and Kings of Leon.

It seems like a wonderful, happy-ever-after story. Ray cries out like a possessed religious convert on the opening song Trouble, "I've been saved by a woman!", and in nearly every song lays out such zealous declarations of love and longing that he makes James Blunt sound like a little boy complimenting his mum.

But sadly, despite the wife and two children he refuses to talk about, Ray still seems to be searching for salvation. "I am still looking for love. I'm a very emotional person. I'm not an easy person to be with because I don't like myself and I'm definitely not an easy person to love."

When not forced to endure the painful experience of touring, he retreats back to his self-built wood cabin in Maine. "I feel calm when I'm on my own. TV gives me a headache so I just like to read and ride around the hills on my motorbike."

The balance of anguish and self-loathing against the relief or security that music might give him seems precariously poised in LaMontagne. "I keep writing songs because I have to. They just come to me. I still haven't written anything that sounds as good as Dylan though."

But equally, he threatens, "I'll give it all up in two years if I haven't made it. It's just too hard to have to keep going through this without a level of success."

At the gig, when the lights go back on, everyone is still, stunned into an emotional silence by what they've just heard. A queue of fans slowly begins to approach Ray. For a moment you think he is going to bolt, but he doesn't; he pauses a while in the light and allows himself to feel their appreciation before he disappears again.